


I'll Set You Up Against The Stars

by twofoldAxiom



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gods & Goddesses, F/M, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Past Child Abuse, Tags to be added
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-02-10
Updated: 2017-02-10
Packaged: 2018-09-23 07:26:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,212
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9646259
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/twofoldAxiom/pseuds/twofoldAxiom
Summary: Dave Strider has been dreaming of gods for the past year, and it's only now that he gets a visitation from the goddess of oracles herself- which doesn't explain much, but is probably a step in either the right direction, or certain doom.





	

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written for an [anonymous request](http://chess-and-snickers.tumblr.com/post/143252445819/wine-red-by-the-hush-sound-with-dave-rose) of DaveRose to The Hush Sound's "Wine Red", with the original concept and much of the first and second chapters' content written by tumblr user and great friend [thehornedwitch.](http://thehornedwitch.tumblr.com/)
> 
> Things got waaaay out of hand re: story length and plot development, and also I changed a lot of the stuff written in this chapter, but the contributions are still incredibly significant even if my co-writer never touches this story again. This literally would not exist without their help.
> 
> So yo, Ruth, if you're reading this and can't write for it anymore, this is still dedicated to you! (And also please send me your AO3 URL if you have one so I can properly credit you as cowriter.)
> 
> Updates will be even more sporadic than usual, because life.

The incense stings your nose a little when you first light it, like it always does, flaring like a match. It doesn’t hurt your eyes anymore at least, so that’s a perk. You set the incense into the little hollow at the base of the statue, setting up the sticks properly, and then you kneel.

“Hey Rose, it’s me again. How’s life?” You murmur, letting the smoke curl soothingly around you. The statue doesn’t answer of course, so you continue. “The dreams are getting more specific. I know I’m not supposed to ask for a literal handout from the divine, but shit’s getting a little crowded up in the old thinkmeats without having weird dreams in the way, too.”

You run a hand through your hair and readjust your shades. It’s hot in the temple, but you don’t loosen your buttons any; not out of respect for the place, but because of the crawling feeling of being watched.

But you’re alone. You know this, from the early morning silence and the news you’re about to offer up to her.

“I’ve finally moved out of the apartment and into one of my own, so whoever you spoke to, to get that done, thanks. My living quarters are now a hundred-percent smuppet free. Bro can go torment some other poor, adoptable fuck. May the Blood God be upon him for his bullshit after all these years, right?”

You chuckle dryly and wonder why your palms are clammy. The faintest thread of desperation makes its way through your voice when you speak again. “This is the fifth time this month and the twentieth time this year that I’ve had these dreams. You know me, I’m not the most pious guy this side of the city; I’m pretty fuckin’ far from pious. Hell, I didn’t start coming here until the dreams started, what, last January?”

You look into the statue’s glinting, amethyst eyes, set into a marble face. You could swear they followed you, but that could be because of the flicker of candles around her, tinting the pallid stone almost like skin. You glance at your watch, and at the idol of Aradia that you’d left offerings for earlier. You turn your face back to Rose’s statue.

“What the fuck are you trying to tell me?” You ask. The temple is almost deafeningly silent but for the crackle of oil in the sconces along the walls. “Am I supposed to repent and become a priest?” You joke. “Is this about the mother I’ve never met?”

You almost expected an answer then, but, nothing. “I’ll take that as a no. But if I keep dreaming of gods I’m going to talk to a priest about it. Or a therapist. I’m going to detail every weirdly intimate subconscious encounter that I can remember. Freud will have a field day, and at least one person will tell me to convert to Christianity or some shit. You can tell the Blood God that’s a promise, if he doesn’t bite your head off.”

At any rate, you should finish your prayer, so you murmur, “I’ll talk again later, when I don’t feel like an idiot for praying.” And pour the cheap red wine you brought on the steps of her altar. You take a deep breath of the incense-heavy air and stand, stretching your legs and turning around.

When you step out of the temple, the sun nearly blinds you, even through your shades. It’s dawn yet, best time for you to go to the temple where no one will bother you for swearing in front of the idols of the Thirteen, which you do a lot, and which Jade doesn’t mind because you always bring offerings, even if you don’t have the money to make really good ones. You wonder if offering quality actually makes a difference, but decide against it, or rich people would get more visitations than they do.

You yawn as you saunter down the sidewalk to your apartment building, passing by The Hobo on the way. The Hobo has been there for as long as you’ve lived on this street, because even if you’ve moved out of Bro’s place you couldn’t move far; all matted curly hair and thick dark rags that make his body shapeless and vaguely distorted. He’s muttering like usual, rocking back and forth, and you drop some change in front of him and don’t bother looking to see if he’s picked it up.

Home sweet home isn’t far off from the temple either. You go up the stairs and push open the door that you didn’t bother locking because you haven’t even unpacked anything important yet, you’ve only moved in yesterday after all; the mattress doesn’t even have covers yet. You don’t mind that fact much as you reflexively kick it, then call yourself an idiot and flop onto it without even taking off your shoes. You close your eyes and even out your breathing, listening to the city start to wake up outside.

It may just be because of dream logic, but you aren’t even mildly surprised to find yourself slowly shaken awake by the same girl you’ve been dreaming of for the past few months.

She smiles at you, dark lips and a wild glint in her eyes.

~!~

Your name is Dave Strider and you’ve been dreaming of gods for a little over a year now.

It started last year, when you were seventeen, and you thought the years of abuse had finally gotten to you and you were going crazy. That’s what it was, after all; you’d convinced yourself you’d come to terms with the fact that Bro was an abusive piece of shit, but then you started having dreams of gods and monsters and a girl with lips the color of electrical tape, and you thought either you’d been watching too much late night anime or it was a sign of mental instability.

You didn’t think about it too hard. But you started working to get out of there, just in case.

This is your first day sleeping in a bed that didn’t have a trap to spring before falling into it.

It takes a lot longer than you would like for you to wake up. By the time you do, it’s muggy as fuck and your mouth tastes like cotton. Also, because of the anxiety Bro has instilled in you that will probably require a few years of intense therapy to get over, you’re immediately aware that you aren’t alone.

You peel your eyelids back, lashes slightly sticking to each other, and force yourself to look around the room. You’re at least not about to be ambushed because you spot the intruder immediately, because it’s not like she’s trying very hard to hide. She isn’t trying at all.

She’s a woman about your age, sitting on one of your boxes and facing you, her legs crossed and her hands folded neatly in her lap. You swear to yourself you’ve never seen her before in your life.

Not while awake, anyway, says a traitorous voice in the back of your mind.

You lick your cracked lips and sit up, readjusting your shades and trying to straighten your clothes a little. Figures a beautiful woman breaks into your apartment and you look like shit. Your neck cracks and you’re pretty sure there’s dried drool on your chin, but you lean against the wall and try to play it cool like always. “Can I help you?”

“Not while you’re still half asleep.” She has a voice that rings in your mind weird, wrong and cold, and you bite your lip and think, is she one of Jade’s friends? Did you meet her with Jade some time ago? You don’t get to ponder it long before she stands up. 

“Dave Strider?” She asks, and just from that you know you’ve definitely forgotten her from somewhere, because she asks it in the way that implies she already knows.

“Yeah.” You push your shades up your nose so she can’t see how your eyes are following her every move. She gives you a closed-lipped smiles and sits beside you on the bed, and while you kind of want to either inch away or maybe inch a little closer, you don’t do either. “One and only, and yes, it’s my real name.”

“It’s been a while already; I’m starting to get forgetful. You were a Devon last time.” She says, tucking a lock of hair behind her ear and turning her head slightly as she does so. When you see her in profile, you finally have it click in your head where you’ve seen her before no matter how hard you deny it, and you gulp silently.

“So,” You begin. “To what do I owe the honor?”

“I’ve finally gotten permission to speak with you in person. It’s a timed visit, but how could I leave such an ardent follower in the dark? What Lady of Light would I be?” She answers, and you peer into her eyes over your shades to find yourself looking into pearlescent lavender, shimmering faintly with colours you know no one can name. Her skin looks like marble and her lips are wet and black.

“Oh my god.” Is all you can actually say.

“Yes.” She says back. “Exactly.”

Visitations aren’t a completely impossible occurrence in the world, the gods want to remain known, but you never thought you would get one; or at least not such a direct one. You stammer. “The dreams.”

Her smooth brow furrows slightly, before she gets a flash in her eyes- a literal flash, like light striking opal- and she simply says “Yes, the dreams. My herald and my sign.”

“You really sent them?” You ask, trying to fill the space in the air where your thoughts usually are. You find yourself blanking out; literally sitting next to a goddess in a cramped apartment can do that to someone, even someone as good at filling the air with bullshit as you.

You wonder if you’re one of many to make a goddess roll her eyes, but at least she does it with a slightly warmer smile, like doing it with an old friend. You can only look at her puzzled, and somehow that makes her expression fall- not hard, but flat and sad.

“... Am I forgetting something? Did I owe you something? Shit, is it about time for me to sire a firstborn?” You chuckle, biting back hysteria, and scratch the side of your neck and she shakes her head.

“Nothing so crude. I’m a goddess of Light, not some woodsland witch.” She does shrug and nod at you though. “Though I wouldn’t be opposed to you siring a child in my name after everything I’ve had to do to get to this point. It would help...” She chews her inner cheek. “I can’t make the decision for you, but it would be a dramatic way of accepting my presence, wouldn’t it?”

You feel like something out of one of the shitty animes your brother used to watch, except she’s not fawning all over you, and she very clearly took the form of a grown and very self-possessed woman in plain, conservative, businesslike clothing. She could be anyone down the street, except you realize her black lips aren’t lipstick, and her eyes never blink.

You sag against the wall as she stands up and slinks to the other room, her footsteps barely touching the floor. She comes back with a glass of water which you accept gratefully and drink down before putting carefully on the floor. “So again, what’s the deal here? Get proverbially couched by the other gods and need to shack up with a mortal until they let you back up into heaven?”

She shakes her head again, and she looks so sad that it makes something in your chest twinge slightly. “I just need you to remember.”

“But you can’t tell me what I need to remember. Right. Okay. I can work with this.” You huff, more a deep breath really, and look at the time. It’s about twelve, and you wonder how long she stayed there, watching you sleep. You rub your arms a little at the thought, before you turn to face her again. “Do goddesses need to eat lunch?”

~!~

Rose is nothing like you’d expect a goddess to be like, and yet everything you’d expect all at once. For one, she drinks the crappy wine you bought like grape juice, and yet her preternaturally pale skin remains just that, paler than even yours, not even a hint of flush. You take her out to your favourite hole in the wall to eat, and try to think of it as a date; it’s easier to think of it like that if you don’t look at her without your shades, but that means you can’t side-eye her either.

She asks for raw heart, tells the waiter it’s because of a medical condition. The waiter is used to you trying to weird him out and that doesn’t give him any pause, he merely asks her if she would prefer cow or chicken.

She eats daintily, slicing thin strips of raw, bloody meat with a steak knife and popping them in her mouth with the fork. The only really weird part is how fast she does it. You half expect her to break the elegant facade and lick the plate, once she goes through her second cow heart. Watching her makes you a little queasy, and you’re glad you weren’t hungry enough for more than a sandwich. It probably would’ve come up again, just watching her rip into animal organs.

The irony of the situation is not lost on you. You are the master of sensing the ironic.

Another reason you’re here is because seeing her against a backdrop of other people helps ground you a little. Yeah, she’s really here. No one else seems to have decided to comment on the fact that she is a literal goddess, whether they don’t notice or they don’t care because she isn’t as fearsome as the First Twelve isn’t clear to you, but you know she’s the real deal with the hard conviction of any saint.

More irony points to you.

Anyway, you finish your panini and she finishes her heart, and then the both of you reach for your respective drinks, have a couple sips, and put them down in unison. The hair on the back of your neck hasn’t gone down since you left the apartment.

“No, they don’t notice me. I know you’re wondering, dear, no need to keep quiet.” The question has been bubbling on the tip of your tongue, wondering why the other patrons haven’t started crawling on their knees begging her to give them visions of things to come. “I do have some form of camouflage, you know. They only see what I want them to see. Not quite as good at it as our Lady of Stars, mind you, but I don’t need to be.”

You flinch. Kanaya has a notoriously wicked temper towards jokesters. You can still recall the newspaper article detailing the events surrounding a girl who’d ended up seriously facially compromised after insulting the Moth Queen inside her own temple. It had been an active year  for visitations and portents.

She could be baiting you. Or trying to make it obvious that you’re safe with her, which doesn’t make you feel very safe. Insult the Huntress why doesn’t she, send a live puma to your apartment.

“Cat’s still got your tongue, then?” 

You blink.

“Are you reading my mind?”

Her ivory-carved expression is nigh impossible to read. Might as well be making conversation with a statue, except she frowns and scoots her chair back.

And as you drink, she says, “Not much to read even if I could.”

You spray, like an idiot; the burn was bad and you’ve been so highstrung you can’t help but laugh, and when you come to you realize that not a drop is on her and she’s holding up a napkin for you. The tiniest little smirk crawls up and over Rose’s face as you process the situation. 

“Not much to read even if I could, but I don’t need to read your mind to know exactly what kind of joke will do that.” It’d have been funnier if you’d been watching from across the restaurant, but it does serve to ease the tension a little. Someone who’ll fuck with you makers you feel safer, more sure of where you stand and your own abilities, than someone who never drops the other shoe.

She scoots her chair back in place and wipes bread across the blood on her plate while you gather yourself, and you think, okay, that just happened. You cough a couple more times into your fist and peer at her through your shades, blinking, before you suck it up and ask her what’s  _ really  _ been bothering you.

“So about the dreams.” You begin. She doesn’t stop you, so you continue. “Can you answer questions about them?”

“That would depend entirely on the question.” She doesn’t even eat the bread, you’re pretty sure she’s drawing on her plate before she looks up at you. “You’ll have to ask and see what I say.”

You can work with that. Unlike most dreams,  _ the  _ dreams have a pretty coherent plot going on. They’re the same dream, basically, with different toppings and settings. You suck your lower lip and ask, “Are they literal?”

“They  _ were _ .” She squishes the bread against the plate, entirely ruined with blood, and raises her hand to lick a stray droplet off of her thumb. It’s blackened, like many of her follower’s fingers. This century it’s popular to divine via drawings of charcoal on the ground, and as such she reflects the same.

You huff quietly and slump into your chair. “Alright, miss cryptic, we can play twenty questions with this if we need to.” You can feel her staring into you, those pearly eyes steady and perfectly unblinking.

You twitch a little, shake off the feeling of her eyes. “Are they visions?”

“No.” Okay, straight answer, you’re on the right track. She leans forward slightly, resting her elbows on the table and supporting her head on the backs of her hands. “That is to say, they aren’t showing you what’s coming. Please continue.”

“Right.” You push your shades up, just a little, gesture with your hands. “You know the dream last Friday? When Aradia and Sollux spoke?”

“Yes.” She studiously mulches the bread further, until it looks like rotten flesh, and you have to gulp your sandwich down a little.

You remember the gold scales and sharp planes of Sollux’s face with picture perfect clarity, the smoky coils of Aradia’s hair and the terrible white heat of her iron teeth. Aradia spoke like you’d  _ expect _ death to sound. Like what souls leaving bodies probably sound like, if they make a sound.

“So what are they?”

“Very poetic.” She says.

You lick your lips and think, this is going to be harder than you anticipated. But you never thought it was going to be easy.

She licks her fingers again. “Ask another question.”


End file.
